It is more than 30 years since I saw Pablo Picasso’s Guernica face to face, as it were, in Madrid’s Prado Museum, shortly before it was moved into the Museo Reina Sofia, where it still hangs. Painted in 1937 in furious protest at Germany’s bombing of the Basque town of Guernica at the behest of Franco’s nationalist forces during the Spanish civil war, Picasso had refused permission for it to be housed in Spain until the return of democracy.
I had seen dozens of images of the painting. But nothing could prepare me for standing in front of it. There was, first, its overwhelming size, something no image can portray. Guernica stands more than 3.49m x 7.76m. You don’t so much view the painting as the painting wraps itself around you and you are drawn into its emotions and intensity.
